Hennessy Can’t Get No Love

From rankings, at least. While Stanford has an on-again-off-again attitude towards college rankings such as the U.S. News and World Report’s annual statistics related to our continued appearance in the top 5 best colleges, Stanford’s president, John Hennessy, didn’t manage to make a similar list–Time Magazine’s top 10 University Presidents.
In fact, none of the presidents of the “powerhouse schools”–schools such as Stanford, the techstitutions (MIT/Caltech), or the Ivy League–were to be found on this list, which instead favored presidents of bigger public schools (Ohio State, Michigan) and unknown schools (UT Brownsville, Miami Dade College). Heading the list, though, is Ohio State’s E. Gordon Gee, who also happens to be the country’s highest paid president of a public school with a salary of about 1.3 million dollars per year.

Hennessy makes around 630,000 dollars per year (after pay cut), which puts him directly in the middle of his peers: average salaries for presidents of private research universities such as Stanford recently rose to around 628,000 dollars per year. Even though, I would argue that Hennessy is paid too much–as outlined in an article I wrote earlier this year.
Still, President Hennessy probably deserves credit for bringing in an absurd amount of private donation money over the last few years, even if its not enough to save us from the massive budget cuts he is championing. Oh well–at least somebody thinks he’s doing a great job.

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